Home  About  Chapters  Policy  Publications  Join  Jobs  Donate  Blog  Students signing in at the Berkeley Roosevelt launch, "Powered by Progress." Wed 9/7/05 at the Lipman Room News from the National Office Post-Election Center TI Launched Roosevelt LiveBlogs the Presidential Debate On Campus Midwest Regional Fall Policy Workshop Blum speaks at Vermont Campus Compact conference Coverage of the Johns Hopkins Chapter Launch > More "We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future." — Franklin Roosevelt    Increasing Social Mobility > Roosevelt Home > Roosevelt Challenges > Increasing Social Mobility Your name: Your email: Recipient's name: Recipient's email: Message: To prevent spam, please enter the first letter of the recipient's email and the first letter of the recipient's name in the box below (for example, if the name is "John Doe" and the email is "bigjohn@johndoe.com", you would enter "jb"): By Gregory Geusic Categories: Economic policy, Education, Human rights, Labor and workers' rights, Poverty and social justice, Public health The Challenge: develop policies that promote the American promise of merit-based advancement and social mobility Important Progressive: accomplishing this challenge will contribute directly and specifically to the progressive values embodied by Roosevelt's Statement of Principles Meaningful: our contribution to this challenge will produce a real change in the lives of our fellow human beings. One can imagine a world in which the challenge is solved, and such a world is better than the one we live in today. Relevant: the challenge is relevant to the social contract project that Roosevelt has embarked upon Though founded on principles of meritocracy, America's increasing polarization of wealth has reduced chances for social mobility and advancement for the poor and middle class. Low quality urban schools and the skyrocketing cost of college tuition place barriers in front of students from low-income backgrounds. Predatory lending practices prey on vulnerable individuals, trapping them in endless cycles of poverty. Inadequate health care coverage place additional burdens on over 45 million Americans struggling to get by. Working to correct these problems will greatly help low and middle-income individuals in their struggle to advance in America. Innovative We're looking for policy challenges where innovation is needed: where there isn't already a clear solution or best practices, but solutions can be developed creatively. Our goal is to develop options, not to lobby or advocate for a solution that is already known or to debate among several yes or no outcomes or pre-defined policy choices. Other organizations do the important work of debating and lobbying, that's just not our place in the process. Typically if you're looking at a standard policy debate you can apply what's known as the "Roosevelt Reframe" to develop new strategies to advance shared values. So rather than "should we engage in race-based affirmative action in college admissions" to which the potential answers are "yes" and "no", you can ask "how do we make our colleges more diverse", a goal we hope is shared by those on both sides of that debate. Health care, education, and workers rights are all issues that have seen little progress or advancement in the past decade. While there is clear consensus about the need for reform on a number of these issues (particularly health care), there is very little agreement about how to achieve change. Many of the ideas in the public discourse have been around for years but have failed to gain widespread support. An environment strongly supporting change but lacking direction and popular solutions is the ideal climate for Roosevelt's ideas to succeed. Feasible Approachable: given the level of research and discourse already available and given who else is working on the issue, college students with a range of experience levels and with varied types of expertise can contribute meaningfully to the debate and are likely to think of good ideas. We don't want something so technical only engineering majors can contribute to it, or something that is already dominated by another think tank or advocacy organization. Practical: the challenge is stated as a specific, measurable, and achievable goal, incremental progress toward which could be made by chipping away at the problem at various levels of government. The statement is not too broad or too narrow. One good way to make sure something is a good policy challenge rather than a debate or advocacy problem is to think of what sorts of innovative ideas might be produced for the 25 ideas publication series on that topic. This type of reform can be implemented at any level of government. Chapters can work with City Councils and municipal offices to develop community-based solutions, and the national organization can lobby Congress for national and state reform based on the success of local programs developed and implemented by the chapters. Comments Kyle Atwell, Sun 8 Jul 10:05 pm PST: Love this area of research, but also feel like we covered a lot of mobility issues with the "Working Families" and "Higher Education" challenges. Spencer Sherman, Mon 9 Jul 9:29 am PST: I'd say this is arguably the single most important issue in the country for us to tackle. Kyle's right, though: it's basically a reformulation, in much broader terms, of some of the challeges from last year. I'm not sure whether or not that's a bad thing. Kai H Stinchcombe, Mon 9 Jul 12:21 pm PST: Good point, Spencer, and I pretty much agree with the uncertainty. A more specific thing would be "help people get into the middle class" if we approached it pretty quantitatively (e.g. "here are the six leading ways for people to get into the middle class and the three things that drop people out. we developed three ideas each to promote the former and prevent the latter.") that might be a little more specific. That was what I was trying to get at, sort of, with the bankruptcy thing. But again I don't know if we want more specific or less... Sarah Fitz-Randolph Brown, Mon 9 Jul 6:42 pm PST: I think this issue is one of our strongest when it comes to both interest and scholarship. And, given that last year was our first year implementing the challenge program I don't think it would be bad to re-tackle the issue in a different way. In addition, this is an area where our presence--as a student organization--is accepted and appreciated. Also, from a fundraising standpoint this will be considerably easier to raise funds for--we already have measurables, results, and examples to point to. Gregory Geusic, Mon 9 Jul 6:51 pm PST: I think Sarah raises a really important point. Take a look at the Core chapters, and you'll find that almost all of them have centers dealing with economic justice and education. We should pick challenges that the chapters are able to work on, given their existing infrastructure. Besides, we just spent the past year building relationships with activist groups and lawmakers that care about similar issues - working families and higher ed. This challenge will allow us to continue to utilize those connections while expanding on our work and taking it in a slightly new direction, building new relationships along the way.   The Roosevelt Institution is a nonpartisan, nonprofit national think tank devoted to bringing students' policy ideas to the policy process. The opinions expressed on this site are exclusively those of its members. DC Headquarters: Roosevelt Institution / 2100 M St NW Suite 610 / Washington, DC 20037 || (202) 833-1359